


Seasons End, Seasons Begin

by AlexStone



Series: Tolkientober [18]
Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Merrywyn, Post-Lord of the Rings, Tolkientober
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:06:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27234706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexStone/pseuds/AlexStone
Summary: Merry and Éowyn go mushroom picking near the Brandywine. An entwife remembers arriving in the Shire.
Relationships: Merry Brandybuck/Éowyn
Series: Tolkientober [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948141
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	Seasons End, Seasons Begin

**Author's Note:**

> Tolkientober Day 27 - 'A Creature.'
> 
> The Ents are my favourite creatures in Lord of the Rings, especially because of their relationship to time. I wanted to experiment with writing a sequence from an Ent's perspective, and decided to use some Merrywyn fluff to frame that.

Éowyn sat at the foot of an enormous oak tree, on a slow incline overlooking the Brandywine. She had spent the day with Merry searching the Old Forest for mushrooms. She kicked her shoes off, and felt the red soil between her toes. The seasons were late to change, and the lingering heat of summer hung heavy over the Shire. From her seat Éowyn saw the open fields of North Farthing stretching out into the distance, and a small farmstead between herself and the Brandywine. 

“Merry, do you think the Brockhouses are in today?” Éowyn asked. She had grown fond of her new neighbours, and enjoyed Matilda Brockhouse’s apple and rhubarb crumble.

Merry stood from his foraging and squinted at the farmstead. “Can’t tell,” he murmured, before collecting his bags and sitting next to Éowyn, “I swear that kid has been pinching our gourds.”

“Merry Brandybuck, complaining about someone stealing his vegetables. What would Pippin say?” Éowyn tutted with glee in her voice.

Merry stared at the ground as he realised what he had just said. “Gods, I’m so old,” he groaned, throwing his head back in exasperation. 

They laughed and relaxed on the hill, enjoying the afternoon heat. They bounced between conversation topics with the same delicate ease with which they held each other. Éowyn ran her fingers through Merry’s hair, noticing the streaks of silver emerging within the dirty blonde curls. Merry had taken the plunge to grow his beard that summer, and it had finally pushed through its unfortunate patchy phase into an attractive shadow across his jaw. Pippin told Merry the beard made him look like his grandfather, to which Merry had responded that Pippin was jealous that he had inherited the family’s good looks. 

“Did you and Pippin ever go looking for the ents?” Éowyn asked, kneading a knot from Merry’s shoulders.

“We tried visiting Fangorn after Aragorn’s coronation,” Merry squinted as the sun emerged from a low cloud, “but we couldn’t find them there. Helms Deep and Orthanc were empty too. It was weird, no matter where we looked they had just… disappeared. We thought they might have travelled north, deeper into the forest. You could spend years in Fangorn and never find your way out, so we called it quits and came home.” 

Éowyn remembered Fangorn with a shiver. She never understood what Pippin and Merry saw in it. The forest seemed to her to be an immutable wall, some great ancient thing that watched the world with disdain. She had ridden past its borders many times, and each time she felt the prickling sensation of a thousand eyes from a thousand creatures watching her. 

“Pippin thinks we should look for some of the Entwives in the forests near Bree,” Merry continued absentmindedly, “apparently he found some books in Took Manor that talked about tree herders in the Shire. It’s nice to spend time with him, but there’s only so many times I can watch Pippin say hello to a tree. Why do you ask?” 

“I’m not sure,” Éowyn mused, “I guess I was wondering how you would know when you found one.”

“Well, we would… it would…” Merry frowned, and ran his fingers through his beard, “I hadn’t actually thought of that.”

Merry leaned leaned upwards and kissed Éowyn, before resting his head against her chest. It was a few months before they would need to hunker down for the winter, and they had planned to travel to Edoras to coincide with Faramir’s state visit to Rohan. So many plans and preparations. He wondered what had happened to the young hobbit who romped through Farmer Maggot’s fields with Pippin and Frodo. Age crept upon Merry like the seasons. Yet as he woke each morning to find Éowyn by his side, he thought that growing up wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

The entwife saw all of this, and so many other things. A long time ago, long before the Shire was a word in a hobbit’s mouth, she had followed the setting sun, feeling the slow incline of land rolling endlessly towards the sea. One day she decided to stop walking, perhaps because the air was just right, perhaps because she meant to continue walking later. She cannot remember why, but here she had found a square of soft, red soil, into which she dug strong roots. 

Time does not pass for all things in all the same manner. Once she had tried to explain this to a hobbit who liked to read under the shade of her leaves. Yet even as she considered the words she was going to say she had watched him close the book, age, have children, die, be buried at her roots, and his children’s children built a farmstead in her shadow. To those children, the first syllable of the first word the entwife said sounded like a page turning on a long summer day, and it lasted all year. 

She cared for the dead in the same manner as the living. In truth they were the same to her. A body decomposing is still an alive thing, and in maggots and fungal spores she watched an enormous wheel continue to spin as life begat life forever onwards. 

The creeping battle two species of moss caught her attention one day, and when she turned her gaze from it she realised that generations had passed. This was the day she saw the human and hobbit sat at her roots. They were talking about ents, but in their words the entwife heard all the silent words that echo between two hearts in love. The entwife felt an opening, a softening, and a release, and she whispered through the latticed fungi that connected her with all other trees in this forest. 

Éowyn heard a rustling behind her. She rolled over, disentangling herself from Merry’s embrace. She froze the moment she turned to see the forest behind them. Éowyn prodded Merry, and he turned to see what she saw. Before them, every leaf on every tree in the Old Forest was at the same time turning from green, the red, to amber, to golden yellow. Éowyn’s hand found Merry’s, stunned into silence as they watched the seasons transform before their eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on twitter at @AlexStoneWriter! Comments are greatly appreciated.
> 
> You can find the full list of Tolkientober prompts here: https://twitter.com/hobbitgay/status/1311350783238045696


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